Inappropriation Page 8

  Ziggy sinks to the bottom then hovers over the pool filter, shame gnawing at her flesh while the air thins and her head starts to twinkle away. Watching herself, Ziggy feels dense and placid as a toad. She feels herself doubled, partnered, and shoots to the surface like synchronized swimmers. But breaking water, the sensation is gone. All along the pool’s edge hangs a wall of laughing faces. Some girls eye her pityingly, others smirk—relieved that someone else is the worst, most pathetic cretin of the evening. Paddling to the side, her face feels naked as roadkill, her brain is the tingling smash of glass. As she climbs the pool stairs, Jake’s shirt suctions to her chest and Ziggy aches all over. The next moments are a shivering blur of being passed from Tessa to Lex to Suze Lansell-Jones bearing a large bath towel. Ziggy is surprised that her friends seem animated, electric almost, at the event of her harassment. They dash around Cate’s bedroom, fetching Ziggy dry clothes and thick socks and ornate scrunchies. Suze has let them in here without her daughter’s permission, and Ziggy can feel the errant joy radiating from their bodies. But the room is pristinely curated and reveals no information they didn’t already have from Instagram.

  “She’s even emptied her rubbish bin,” groans Tessa.

  They find nothing aside from a small plastic case that could be evidence Cate wears a night retainer. When Ziggy is dressed and verbal again, the three girls abandon Cate’s bedroom. Ascending back to street level in the Lansell-Jones elevator, Ziggy feels her friends’ sympathy cloak warmly around her. The two girls are still buzzing. None of them met a potential formal date, but Ziggy was traumatized, which seems to be just as good. Tessa and Lex eye her expectantly, eager for her emotional condition and whatever she might want to do next.

  “We could go back to mine for a Jacuzzi?” she offers, realizing this is exactly where she wants their evening to end: snuggled together in warm, bubbling water.

  Her friends are surprisingly enthusiastic. Despite the absence of danger or men, they seem excited to join Ziggy in isolated and luxurious self-soothing.

  At her house, Ziggy lends her navy one-piece to Tessa, while Lex gets the bikini. As they drop their modesty sarongs, Ziggy watches her kiddie costumes bloom new curves like exotic sea sponges. She stands at the pool fence, swaddled in a giant beach towel.

  Lex steps straight in and glides to the wall, leans back against it, head tipped skyward. But Tessa toes in anxiously, her eyes cutting between the pool gate and the deep blue of the Polish topiary. Then she performs a full-body shiver, squeals, and plunges into the water.

  “He’s there!” Tessa cries, midair. “Watching from the bushes!”

  “Where?” whispers Lex. She turns to face the wall then presses flush against it. Tessa does the same.

  “Now I’ve lost him,” says Tessa, resting her chin catlike on the edge. “We’ll have to keep watch.”

  Ziggy assumes sentinel on the side adjacent to Lex. A strange, menacing silence enfolds them as Ziggy’s friends slide in closer to the spa jets. She recalls the rumor of a faucet-humping girl who wound up in the ICU with an air-bubble aneurism. A pounding amazement fills her head as Ziggy realizes what Tessa and Lex are doing.

  “Now he’s watching us from the house,” says Lex. “On his wide-screen.”

  Tessa peers around anxiously. “There’s surveillance everywhere.”

  “He’s got ten security cameras filming us from different angles—” Lex’s breath catches. “And he’s just watching us from his massage chair at the fireplace.”

  Ziggy has seen photos of the rapper’s palatial estate. She is familiar by now with the layout and appliances. What surprises her about Lex’s fantasy is that Tessa is playing along.

  “‘YOLO,’ he says, and then starts to rub his penis.” The cyborg is very slightly shuddering.

  Ziggy’s friends stare off into the dark, eyes glazed with a strained inward focus. Together, they continue to narrate in a tone that moves between outrage and arousal. Ziggy presses into the wall too, but she is fighting hard against the hot shiver building inside her. She doesn’t want to be aroused. She doesn’t want to be thinking of a black man thinking of two young girls masturbating in a Jacuzzi. It feels like a trap—a test that she is going to fail. Ziggy tries to make it unsexual; first she conjures the taste of chocolate and then she tries to imagine what the Latin electives at school think of when they masturbate, and finally she just stares down through the bubbles to the hazy white of her submerged thigh. Ziggy orgasms and it feels intensely autoerotic.

  Once her friends leave, Ziggy researches the word autoerotic. After reading three articles about auto-asphyxiation deaths and then watching a walrus jerk off in captivity, she decides it could be a sad and lonely path. But it seems too early to tell if Ziggy prefers masturbation to sex with other people, considering her lack of experience or options. Checking her emails, Ziggy sees that at ten P.M., Hitler Youth sent her an ad for nunchakus; which was probably the exact moment she was hurling the noodle at her loutish rivals. Ziggy understands that if she identifies as a transgender male, Tessa will include her in the women of color category; whereas if she only likes girls, it seems Ziggy is just another predacious lesbian. But she feels less like a boy than an alien. Cartoon lizard might be closer. Even “genderqueer” is probably too queer for someone who just wishes they had pubic hair. If anybody asks, Ziggy thinks it’s now safest to call herself a gender-neutral autoerotic secular Jewish person, happy to live in the diaspora.

  DAYS LATER TESSA CALLS a moratorium on their games. She has new information about trauma, gleaned from a new girl in her extracurricular acting class. Tessa does jazz ballet and acting at a dance academy in the Inner West, where she has access to public school girls. The new girl, Charmaine, has had small but meaty roles in three feature films, and last year—handing her the gold statue for Most Outstanding Newcomer—Cate Blanchett whispered to Charmaine that she thought the younger actress was “just fabulous.” At the ceremony’s after party, Charmaine flirted with Cate’s husband until she realized he was just a caterer, so she ran off with his cigarettes, which she smoked on the balcony with Cate’s real husband, who gave her his email.

  Charmaine says Tessa is wrong about Method acting, and you don’t make your suffering up; you have to dredge up past suffering. She says real Method acting is like being black. You can’t just slip it on like a costume or paint it over your face. It must already live inside you and be hauled up in a process called “affective memory.” Charmaine says difficult childhoods are good, trauma is better. Emotional suppression is for people who only want to do Oscar Wilde plays or wish you a happy Australia Day. And she would know: Charmaine is indigenous.

  Tessa drags Lex and Ziggy along to a Saturday afternoon dance recital, where it becomes quickly obvious that she is infatuated with the Aboriginal actor-singer-dancer. After the show, the three of them huddle in the foyer, watching as the other girls dash around in leotards, swigging from champagne flutes. Ziggy is entranced by these government-schooled girls; she has seen them at Central Station—rolling their own cigarettes while wearing sports bras as tops or standing in loud, abrasive clusters, fingering their belly piercings on public transport. Once she witnessed a pack of them stationed at opposite ends of an escalator, forcing two private school girls to ride up and down for a full Sisyphean ten minutes.

  In hushed tones by the foyer exit, Tessa relays a few of Charmaine’s recent celebrity encounters—an epic bender on the yacht of a nineties pop icon, a gropey limo ride with a drunken soapie star—claiming that, actually, she and Charmaine share a similar trauma. That they really “get” each other. Lex listens with a raised eyebrow; Ziggy doesn’t like the sound of it either. As if friendship were a prize for mutual suffering. But when they are finally introduced that night, Charmaine is really nice.

  “So you’re all Kandara girls?” she asks them.

  Lex and Ziggy nod uneasily. But Charmaine seems genuinely interested. She even has gossip about the tiny celebrity whose daughter goes to their sc
hool.

  “A makeup artist told me that her wardrobe lady had a suit delivered to the guy’s house and saw him standing on his balcony beside another man in matching dressing gowns.”

  The three friends gasp.

  “Which shouldn’t be surprising,” she continues. “Seeing as he belongs to that alien cult.”

  “What alien cult?” Ziggy feels herself leaning too close to the affable prodigy.

  “You know, the cult that says humans are descended from birdlike aliens?”

  “Don’t the members all fly around in private jets?” Evoking class consciousness, Lex is clearly showing off.

  “Yep,” says Charmaine. “To remind them of their origins.”

  “I heard it was to deter them from violence and homosexuality.”

  Charmaine meets Lex’s sass with more amenability. “Yep, they’re all closeted celebs with fake girlfriends.”

  At this revelation, Lex’s face visibly falls, taking personally the news of an outed male celebrity. She can tell Lex doesn’t like Charmaine, but Ziggy feels a deep, psychic attraction. She has never met anyone so special. During the Jackson 5 medley, when the beat died and the other girls dropped to the floor, Charmaine rose like a thin, brown stamen from the tight bud of red leotards to serenade her pet rat floating high in the nosebleeds. From the dark, musty hind of the auditorium, Ziggy and Lex watched Charmaine quiver onstage with flamelike intensity. When Charmaine’s voice soared, Ziggy felt Lex’s shoulders scrunch up. Charmaine’s alto had the harsh, clarifying quality of strong cleaning product. On Ziggy’s friend it had both a startling and slightly toxic effect.

  When Charmaine abandons them in the foyer, the trio return to Ziggy’s house. Tessa disemminates a steady stream of anecdotes, including Charmaine’s first acid trip, which ended in a hotel pool passed out on Heath Ledger’s old surfboard. Lex glowers. Ziggy isn’t disturbed by Tessa’s infidelity and finds she can nourish herself on mere proximity to celebrities. Knowing someone who knows someone almost famous, she can feel the electric emanations buzzing off her own skin. Then Tessa tells them Charmaine once did a karaoke duet with Iggy Azalea, and Lex gets mean.

  “Can you please explain how your prosthetic arm is just like Aboriginal genocide?”

  “My trauma isn’t about my arm,” Tessa says with calm condescension. “It’s about alcohol.”

  “Well, Charmaine’s is still worse.”

  “How?”

  “Her trauma is historical.”

  “So’s mine!” yells Tessa. “Everyone on my mother’s side has been alcoholic since the convicts.”

  “Yeah, but nobody committed genocide on your culture then fucked you up with booze.”

  “What do you think the Potato Famine was?”

  “The Irish drank before the Potato Famine!”

  “Fine,” says Tessa. “I don’t need your approval. The fact is, I have trauma, and you saying ‘The Irish drank anyway’ or ‘Now you live in Rose Bay’ isn’t going to take that away from me.”

  “Fine,” says Lex. “Keep your Potato Famine trauma.”

  “I will,” says Tessa. She eyes her friend doggedly. “And actually, I need some help with it.”

  “Help?”

  “I need to get stoned.”

  Lex snorts. “I thought you didn’t like ‘that out-of-control feeling’?”

  “Which is why I need to experience it. If I can’t drink, I need to get stoned.” Tessa rolls her shoulders back courageously. “Would you please roll me a joint?”

  Ziggy doesn’t understand this. She speaks tenderly. “But Tess, what does getting stoned have to do with the Potato Famine?”

  “I need to know how my ancestors felt.”

  “When they were drunk?”

  “When they were drunk because they were being persecuted.”

  Lex isn’t buying it. “But I thought real Method acting meant you could only access old suffering, not create any new ones?”

  “Yes, but when your trauma is hundreds of years old, you need to supplement Charmaine’s method with the intensive Leonardo DiCaprio version.”

  Lex rolls her eyes epically. Ziggy thinks Tessa could probably just cast her mind back to yesterday afternoon, when her alcoholic mother was no doubt drunk and abusing the housemaids. But she doesn’t want to rattle Tessa, her friend seems anxious enough. Then Ziggy sees the tremble in Tessa’s hand, and feels herself caving. For the first time since they met, the invulnerable cyborg looks genuinely terrified.

  “We can smoke in here,” Ziggy offers.

  Tessa beams gratitude. “Thanks, Ziggy.” She looks at Lex, her eyes rounding with secret significance. “It will be good for all of us to enter a different reality.”

  “All right,” says Lex. “But seriously, no panic attacks.”

  “I promise,” says Tessa. “That would be inflicting emotional labor, and I’ve already spent this month’s allowance.”

  Ziggy is dumbfounded. All this time, she could have been charging her mother a fee.

  IT IS EARLY SATURDAY EVENING. While they wait for Jeff and Ruth to leave for dinner, the three friends make their preparations. The mood is now buoyant, all aggravation dispersed into jittery mania. Tessa downloads several hours’ worth of sexually explicit music videos; they fill the fruit bowl with oranges in case one of them OD’s. Ziggy imagines getting stoned will be like alcohol but with a dry mouth, less energy, and the strong possibility of a panic attack. Her grip on reality already feels infirm. She is a closeted autoerotic gender-neutral secular Jew who will most likely be taking herself to the formal. Unlike her friends, the only thing that doesn’t scare Ziggy about their endeavor is the risk of getting caught by her parents. Ziggy’s mother would let the girls shoot heroin into their eyeballs if it pushed them closer to selfhood. Still, there is some satisfaction in following the protocol for teenage delinquency. Only when they hear Jeff’s car growl out of the driveway does Lex start to roll the joint.

  Packing the weed, folding the filter, licking the paper shut—Ziggy experiences her friend as possessing a powerful, adult mystique. When Lex lights up, seeing her lips purse against the filter feels somehow intimate. A private behavior on new display. Like watching her kiss someone. Lex pulls hard on the joint then passes it to Ziggy. The lit tip jewels at the ends of her fingers and Ziggy takes it, feeling Lex’s wetness all around the filter. Ziggy inhales and the smoke comes fast, stuffing her throat like cotton. She coughs once, waits, and is pummeled by a rogue swell of coughing. Tears surge at her eyes. Ziggy can’t tell if she is breathing. She rasps at them, but her friends are suddenly distracted by something on Lex’s phone. Tessa appears utterly relaxed. Ziggy takes a glass of water and gulps from it rapidly. Now her throat feels too cold and disturbingly deep. Hitler Youth think Ziggy is probably headed for a heart attack; but while checking her pulse, Ziggy realizes she isn’t coughing anymore. Moments are eclipsing themselves. Time has a thick, alien consistency that swallows her thoughts. Sensory boundaries are dissolving. It is even possible that Hitler Youth are now talking out loud. Saying things like “masturbation” and “pussypenis.” For this reason, Ziggy would like to go downstairs and start blasting music videos on the home entertainment system. Luckily her friends show great enthusiasm for leaving the bedroom.

  By now, Lex and Tessa are acquainted with Ruth’s home decor. They have accepted that certain rocks can come inside, placed on the hides of certain beasts whose bones might sit adjacent on side tables covered with tapestries depicting those same beasts running free, tapestries woven by women with real relationships to the natural world around them. That all of these things might be resonant, even meaningful, to Ziggy’s mother, her friends have accepted without political argument. Maybe it is too subtle with homewares. Like the aura bestowed by a celebrity eau de toilette. Tessa’s Nicki Minaj-shaped perfume bottle seems to be an equivalent cultural appropriation.

  But then there is the living room’s fifteen-foot mural. Ruth’s bizarre feature wall depicts goddesses hanging
from hot-air balloons, Buddhas cross-legged in tree crotches, and Frida Kahlo riding a stallion, bareback, into the setting sun. In the past, Ziggy’s friends have simply laughed at the mural and then sped off to her bedroom. But tonight, confronted with the wall, Tessa breaks away from their orderly little line.

  “Why are all the women white?” she baits Ziggy.

  “They’re Greek goddesses,” Ziggy replies, though this isn’t strictly true. There are Hindus and Native Americans and Russian folkloric witches with names like types of fungi. Ziggy doesn’t know how to defend her mother’s feminism. “Can we please just go down to the TV?”

  Tessa marches to the wall. With her newly indigenized gaze, she studies a patch of savannah, sprigged with meerkats. “If this is Africa, the women should be black.”

  “It’s definitely Africa,” says Lex. “Look at the lion cubs.”

  “Aw, Simba!”

  Lex shakes her head at Tessa. “Not every lion is the Lion King.”

  Fearing conflict, Ziggy moves away from her friends to the far end of the wall, to the green base of Mount Everest where Frida Kahlo rides her sable horse. At school they have just studied the Mexican artist. Ziggy was most fascinated by the bus accident, particularly when their teacher refused to share the gruesome details. Ziggy had pressed her: Wasn’t it necessary to know what the artist’s injuries were? Especially because she did self-portraits? Ziggy had pictured Frida’s crotch with a protruding metal appendage not unlike the actual instrument of wounding. Something about her monobrow and downy mustache made it seem possible that she had replaced her broken parts with a mechanical penis. It annoyed Ziggy that their teacher was more interested in the artist’s colorful head scarves. Ms. Schlager was always talking about Frida’s self-consciousness, something about the male gaze and how she used it to paint herself into existence. According to their teacher, the artist’s “subjective objectivity” was evidenced by her bold stare and eccentric tribal jewelry. But not her facial hair or her protuberant brow and how they might relate to her private parts. Looking at the mural now, Frida’s “subjective objectivity” seems as ambiguous as Ziggy’s. Maybe they both lack a talent for self-objectification. Unlike Tessa and Lex. Ziggy turns back around and sees her friends huddled together beneath Mount Kilimanjaro, taking some sort of internet personality test.